Four tips from one of the world's smartest entrepreneurs

What is smartness? There are different kinds for different human endeavors. A smart football quarterback has little in common with a smart genetics researcher.

And you hardly ever come across an individual who is both a smart professor and a super-accomplished entrepreneur.

Finland-born but U.S-raised Micah Adler has accomplished both. His latest company's name is a testament to his smartness — it's called Fiksu, which means smart in Finnish — and the Boston-based start-up makes "a tech platform for programmatic mobile app advertising."

He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics from MIT and a doctorate in theoretical computer science from the Univ. of Calif. Berkeley. From there, he went to the University of Massachusetts, where he became a tenured professor.

What's unique is that he quit during the year of his tenure-ensuing sabbatical and started three companies that tap into Mr. Adler's love of algorithms based on theoretical computer science, which to him means "proving an algorithm will work or providing evidence that it won't."

In October 2007, The Washington Post Company bought his Wakefield-based CourseAdvisor, an online lead generator serving the education industry, which he co-founded in 2004. Mr. Adler was "president, but my real job was Search Engine Marketing (SEM) algorithm optimization lead." In March 2012, ADP bought Autotegrity, a data analytics company. And he founded Fiksu in late 2008.

Fiksu's success suggests four lessons that any startup CEO should follow.

1. Target a huge opportunity

If you are going to start a company, you are not likely to get any more than 10 percent of the market. So go after a big opportunity with a better solution.

Mr. Adler started Fiksu to figure out how to tap into what he saw as a huge opportunity in mobile.

"I did some analysis and reached a conclusion that many people saw as shocking – there would be $100 billion worth of acquisitions of mobile companies. One thing that helped me reach this conclusion is that Google estimated that mobile ads would reach 30 percent of its traffic. I decided that I needed to get in, and build something and we would learn as we go."

2. Just get started

Success does not come from the first product you ship — but it could come from how you respond to its failure.

Fiksu's initial focus was on building apps, but a major insight led it to change course.

As Mr. Adler explained, "We built a news aggregation app like Google News that was optimized for mobile. For a few months in mid-2009, it was more successful than the New York Times or CNET. But we went from tens of thousands of downloads a day to 50 a day within two months. I said, 'We need to do something beyond PR to get recognition and downloads."

3. Build off your strengths

If you fail fast, fall back on what has made you successful in the past. Mr. Adler decided to fix Fiksu's problem through algorithms.

"We started to develop algorithms to make digital marketing efficient. We reached out to AdMob (acquired by Google), Quattro (bought by Apple), and Millennial Media — which went public. It was costing us $3 to generate a download of our app, which was too expensive. I brought in some PhDs to figure out how to get more efficient," he said.

The result was a technology with mind-boggling efficiency.

"Over the next six months, our cost per download fell from $3 with thousands of downloads per day to $0.26 per download, with tens of thousands daily," he said. "We realized that we had invented something that was powerful, unique, and with broad commercial appeal. We surged to the number one position in the news category on the app store."

According to Mr. Adler, "Thanks to the depth of our algorithm, we can improve our clients' mobile advertising effectiveness by a factor of three — either by increasing the number of app downloads three-fold, or by cutting by a third the cost to generate the number of downloads they want."

Take it from this smart teacher and entrepreneur, these four pieces of advice can help your start-up succeed.